JAMs News

[p]Hey! I am building the screen to view details about the items in inventory, and it's shaping up pretty well!
[/p][p]You can click the heart icon on the item details screen of an item to add that item to be your favorite, and it will replace your clicking button on the main screen. Click favorite again on the same item to disable it. [/p][p][/p][p]I'll be adding more stats and buttons onto this details screen too.

You can use the left/right arrows to navigate to the next items you own, and it will download the primary image for that item as needed. Things load faster once they get cached.[/p][p] [/p][p]The inventory screen itself is still really heavy, we could use a more basic text-based version or a different mode on the existing one, like loading static images of each in inventory and then animate them as you hover, but we'll worry about that later. I didn't make any changes to the inventory screen recently, but I just wanted to add a reminder about this button here in the settings and how it is fairly important at the moment. People with few item types will probably barely notice a difference, this is for those who have tons of different items.[/p][p] [/p][p]Currently they way it works is inventory mode 1 will pre-load your entire inventory (uses tons of RAM, takes a long time, but pages turn instantly when loaded) and mode 2 will load the items one page at a time. You should basically always be using mode 2 for inventory but it can be slow to skip through 20 pages that way so you may still need the preload mode sometimes, for example if you wanted to let it load for a few minutes then quickly browse the pages to the item you want without any delays. [/p][p]At the moment loading my inventory in mode 2 on the first page causes the system to use 2GB of RAM:[/p][p][/p][p]And then using mode 1 (with 348 unique items) it will use over 30GB of RAM:

[/p][p]Which obviously is not ideal, especially as more items get released.. And when you use mode 2, it is a lot lighter but it still eats more memory up as you go deeper into the pages, so we are definitely going to need that tweaked a bit still, just wanted to add in a note about it when people go to use the inventory more.

At least the left/right buttons work on the item details page right now, so if you manage to get really deep in your inventory and click on an item, you can still browse through them fairly easy. I'll try get the inventory page to come back to the last one you were on, that alone will make a big difference. [/p]

[p]Hey small update, I added a clicks-per-second feature on the main screen. Since I set up the autoclicker to go slightly faster with each unique item you own I figured it would be good to have a gauge on the screen where you can see exactly how fast it's going, or if you click at the same time, just a way to measure your speed.

I set it up so if you click on it, it stops calculating in case it had a performance impact on your clicking speed, you have the choice to have it on or not. Helpful also to see if lower framerates have slower speeds!

With 324 uniques (I think I'm only missing a couple) my AC runs at 148 CPS at 60 FPS and 110 CPS at 30 FPS. Pretty big differences in speed so I'm glad I set this up, this was badly needed!

More stuff coming soon just wanted to point out how this works! Cheers!
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Hey everyone!

Well I'm back from my trip and got us caught up on new items, and I was thinking of altering the system in such a way that would accommodate sporadic trips (as I have another one coming up in a month or so anyway) so here is what I have come up with as a solution. I'll just leave them in the drop pool for a longer period of time, still cycle them out but if I fall a few days behind it would barely be noticeable to people if there were a lot of different items dropping.

Previously I was cycling them out every 5 days, I think a number as high as 30 days/items would be pretty reasonable to have as a common drop pool, any more than that would take awhile to get the newer items. And since I switched it to season 2 after fixing things and changing the distribution/timing last time, I figured it was a good time to call this season 3. It should be a lot easier for everyone to stay up to date and would give me much better flexibility to work on the actual game itself, it should work out great this way.

And my favorite bit of good news is that Steam has fixed the auto-stack feature for timed drop items!! I had them configured to do so and when I was on my trip they just started auto-stacking on their own and you will probably notice a lot of other games have their items auto-stacking recently now too. If you stack your items manually once now you won't have to do it again, but I'll still try to get item stacking functionality built into the app at some point.

Thanks for playing and lots of stuff coming down the pipeline in the coming months! :)

Hey I'm gone for a week or so on a trip so I might not be able to make a whole new animation every day, I need to focus on the trip so there may be a day or two coming up without a new daily item but it's not the end of the world, I'll be back really soon! The car I imported (which I'm picking up) is already in storage so I just need to get behind the wheel and hit the road.

I've been trying to prepare animations in advance and I'll bring a laptop, I know some of them seem a bit rushed and I can edit them later but they are turning out alright enough. They all just represent the moment in time which they were created. I have 5 or 6 more already made in advance so chances are we are good to go maintaining the 1-a-day thing but there is going to be a week of pure highway driving and short hotel stays, I could even insert placeholder items to distribute and create animations for them later, to maintain 1 new item for every day of our existence still on the odd chance the trip takes longer than expected.

I'll let you know what goes down though! I'll just not maybe be so specific in the news post about the trip itself for now, but an adventure is in the cards really soon! I was thinking maybe I could even convert videos of the scenery into items, it's lame to do that with old trip footage but if I'm right there videoing the mountains live maybe that would make appropriate more animation to fuse into the game for that day. We'll see what I can whip up!

Oh and a lot of other item games have had their pictures broken because they were using free image hosting services, you don't have to worry about JAMs' images breaking since I pay for hosting. If anyone has a game with broken images, you can contact me if you have issues finding an image host!

Lots of exciting things coming down the pipeline soon!

I'll keep you posted on the trip's progress if anything is out of the ordinary!

Cheers JAMs fam!